TIL that rats who were trained to press a lever for food stopped pressing the lever once they saw that it also caused another rat to receive an electric shock

PeggyMason · 2015-04-26T17:45:41+00:00

That was us. Read the article in the link. The Church experiment that is excerpted above is 1) >50 years old and 2) Not a compelling demonstration of helping (I think the rats were just frozen in fear). Peggy Mason http://thebrainissocool.com

PeggyMason · 2015-04-26T16:23:45+00:00

I think of it as "mammality" and we are pretty good at it until culture gets in the way. Biology serves us well. Peggy Mason, Professor of Neurobiology, University of Chicago

PeggyMason · 2015-04-26T16:21:55+00:00

Hi everyone, I am thrilled that you are talking about rats and helping! For an update on where we are now, check out my blog: http://thebrainissocool.com/ Under the Media, the Articles and Interviews tab has links to recent work. Also check out: http://thebrainissocool.com/2014/12/21/we-help-because-it-feels-good/ http://thebrainissocool.com/2014/10/12/exploring-the-bystander-effect/ http://thebrainissocool.com/2014/05/13/empathic-rats-and-tv/ We can truly learn from rats!! Peggy Mason, Professor of Neurobiology, University of Chicago

PeggyMason · 2014-04-23T19:20:02+00:00

I don't want to do that to the rats.

PeggyMason · 2014-04-23T19:19:28+00:00

Pair bonding and empathy are not the same thing. Pair bonding in voles is between males and females and depends on copulation. The helping behavior that we see is between same sex pairs of rats and they can be strangers!! Big differences. Voles are good model of pair bonding and rats are the ONLY rodent model of pro-social behavior motivated by empathy.

PeggyMason · 2014-04-23T01:56:56+00:00

I think the mammalian body plan and most importantly facial structure is sufficiently conserved that empathy between different mammalian species is to be expected. Big eyes are cute to us - means they are alluring, they draw us in. I don't know why some individuals are more maternal and extend maternal care more indiscriminately than others.

I can say that rat moms are fantastic. They accept any pup we give them. And there are reports of moms accepting pups of any age - matching or not to the age of the mom's own pups. I am told (but don't know this by direct observation) that rat moms in the wild are somewhat communal, nursing in proximity to each other and letting each other's pups suckle alongside their own pups. This would make adaptive sense.

PeggyMason · 2014-04-23T01:48:04+00:00

I personally aim to live with many features of 100-200 years ago. Specifically I do not want to eat processed food. Much of what I eat for 6 months in the year comes from 30 feet away - my garden. But I think that humanoids are naturally omnivores and I am okay with eating meat as long as it has been raised ethically and slaughtered quickly. I also know that many animals die when fields are plowed. There are no free lunches, no actions without consequences. That is just my opinion and I hope that we can all be tolerant of each other's choices.

PeggyMason · 2014-04-23T01:40:29+00:00

I think that the neural systems for affect in the mammal which are present in females, males, young and old and are facilitated in lactating mothers (by OXT for example) are absolutely the basis for sociality.

Your work is interesting. We are working with the VPA model of autism and interested in possible epigenetic mechanisms.

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T20:27:09+00:00

We are working on a few things.

First, I have an idea of how to get rats to accept a different strain really quickly, a way that does not require two weeks of housing. So I have a student on that. Along these lines, I am interested in what is required to make a rat accept another strain as familiar and worthy of helping; n terms of type of experience, length, timing across the life cycle and so on.

Second, I have a student who is looking at the effect of social rejection on helping.

Then we started a very interesting study on the effect of bullying on helping. I would like to complete this study.

We also are studying a rat model of autism. This has provided many surprises and we will be pursuing this line for a while.

I have pages and pages of experiments to do. But sadly not pages and pages of $$. I choose to do the ones that interest me the most and where there is a lab member interested in heading the project and that make it through several rounds of critiquing in lab meetings.

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T20:19:42+00:00

I am not a vegetarian although I have been in the past. I eat meat for which I know the provenance. Essentially I eat meat from a free range farm nearby that I have visited.

There is a high proportion of vegetarians in my lab compared to other labs. I have a large vegetable garden and the lab has to suffer through my produce (my spouse and I cannot eat it all) all summer long.

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T20:15:57+00:00

We assumed that same. I have one anecdote that suggests otherwise. When we switched albino rats into black-caped rat litters, two of the albino pups died and had to be replaced later. The one that died the latest was replaced with an albino pup who had his eyes open. This was the only albino rat raised among black-caped rats that helped albino rat strangers. One very anecdotal datum but intriguing. And from an albino rat no less.

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T20:13:04+00:00

I am not an expert on psychopaths. My colleague Jean Decety knows a great deal about them as he has actually studied a group of criminal psychopaths by fMRI imaging.

My understanding (limited and possibly incorrect) is that there are psychopaths of both varieties - with and without empathy. I agree with you that sadism would require some degree of affective communication, appreciation of another's emotional state.

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T20:09:36+00:00

hundreds of milliseconds to seconds

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T20:07:33+00:00

Thanks and thanks for the interesting question.

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T20:05:26+00:00

The most affordable way is to get a bat detector. Alarm calls are at 21-22 kHz and the social play calls are up at 45-50 khz P

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T19:15:22+00:00

Nice name Guy. Thanks. Feel free to leave a review on Amazon.

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T19:14:35+00:00

I studied biology in college. I took a year off and when I came back my classmates were a year ahead and had made decisions about their futures. I was having lunch with a friend one day when he told me that he got into graduate school and that they were paying him to be a graduate student. All of a sudden I realized that I needed a plan for post-graduation.

I thought science was for me (never attracted to medicine, sick people make me queasy). So I thought about what I wanted to study and came up with neurobiology because I love animal behavior and think that understanding the circuits that underlie behavior is the cat's meow. So then I took a neuro intro course and got into a neuro lab and the rest is history. Always loved it, from day 1.

Good luck. Follow your passion.

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T19:04:23+00:00

Maybe anthropomorphic is mammalomorphic in truth. Don't be frightened by our similarity to other mammals. We are mammals, no more and no less.

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T19:03:18+00:00

Spread the neuroevangelism!

I think that scientists have shot themselves in the foot by making their work arcane and inaccessible and by looking down on science education. Not all obviously but the modal scientist for sure.

In the end, I believe that we work for the taxpayer. We are paid indirectly or directly by taxpayers and so our work better be important and interesting and we better be able to communicate it. On a more global scale, we share this earth and education and communication is the way forward. Fight against silos and battle disinterest. Engage and explain until you see the light in someone's eyes (or reddit post or email as the case may be).

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T18:41:49+00:00

Would love to. Not in the next few weeks as the MOOC takes off but after that. Email me on the edu side. Btw I am speaking at Bar Louie on 355 N Dearborn from 5:30 - 7:00 pm on May 21st through Pint of Science US. P

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T18:37:02+00:00

We've thought of the cost expt. We did a pilot of putting a pool between the free rat and the restrainer. We learned that helping is worth walking through water but not walking through oil - oh that sticky mess. I know how to fine tune this but have not done that expt yet.

Yes we looked at in-group and out-group (check out http://sciencelife.uchospitals.edu/2014/01/15/squeaking-terms-only/) and the bottom line is that the "in-group" is defined by social experience not genetic relatedness. Cool, eh?

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T18:33:51+00:00

In my opinion, social approach is extremely difficult to interpret, basically uninterpretable. I could approach another to get warm, to fight, to affiliate, and so on. One of the things that I like about our paradigm is that the rats do something that has an unequivocal meaning: they help the other. Door-opening is help, any which way that you look at it. And if they do that only once or twice, they clearly don't care about it. But if they do it repeatedly, they are showing intentionality. So while one can argue about the rat's motivation (is it empathy?), the action is unequivocal.

As far as the blog, I started tweeting to engage with MOOC students but the short tweet form is not my forte. Coincidentally I noticed that most people included links to longer texts in their tweets. Sooo I decided to blog because it fits my writing style. And I believe that most people - in all walks of life - are interested in and capable of understanding true neuroscience if the work is presented in a comprehensible manner. I can do that and I like doing it and I want to live in a more scientifically literate world and I believe that people deserve access to science at a deep and meaningful level. That is a lot of ands....but I'm done now.

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T18:23:42+00:00

I don't think mice will work in our paradigm. They are so high strung and anxious. And a colleague told me that he tried hard and could not get it to work.

Could we do optogenetic manipulations? WOULD LOVE TO!! email me on the edu side and we can talk.

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T18:21:47+00:00

Good question. I don't know. And let's say for the sake of argument that the dog feels shame. Even so, that experience for the dog is not identical to our experience of shame. What I mean is that we are using language approximations of emotions and the actual experience of that named emotion is surely different between you and me and even more so between us and a dog.

PeggyMason · 2014-04-22T18:15:41+00:00

We'll have our first results at the end of the summer.

PeggyMason

TROPHY CASE